Originally posted by john_Mark
In your
These on Covenant Theology you state:
6. "New Covenant" Theology
1. Like Dispensationalism, "New Covenant" theology (NCT) is not sufficiently Trinitarian in its hermeneutic
Do you have any further writing showing this so as to understand better this proposition? I apologize if this has been discussed before and I missed it. I would like to get a better grasp on NCT and this line of thought.
Thanks.
Dear J_M,
Dispensationalists tend to worry about reading Christ
into the Hebrew Scriptures.
By contrast, a Trinitarian hermeneutic is one that refuses to read the three persons of the Trinity
out of redemptive history. In other words, the Holy Spirit embedded a witness to the Trinity in the Hebrew Scriptures and the same Spirit who inspired Paul also inspired Moses and the Prophets. The same Son who became incarnate was saving and mediating revelation and salvation before the incarnation. Reading Scripture this way is what I mean by a "Trinitarian hermeneutic." It means seeing the Holy Trinity operating in concert through creation and redemption.
My criticism of NCT (and Dispensationalism) is that they do not see God the Son (and perhaps God the Spirit) operating in the history of redemption as they should. God the Son did not suddenly appear in the New Covenant. He was operating as Mediator and Redeemer before he became incarnate. God the Son is the
Logos, i.e., the Mediator and Revealer. He did not become the Mediator and Revealer in the incarnation.
I see evidence of this in NCT when Tom Wells argues that the historic Reformed terminology "covenant of grace" has been a "mistake." He affirms a unity of God´s purposes through the ages, but says that to use the word "covenant" to describe that unity is not helpful. Like the classic Dispensationalists, Wells teaches that the Christ founded his Church in the NT. It is not clear how NCT can avoid the Scylla of teaching two (or more) ways of salvation. The fact that they pull back from such conclusions is to their credit, but the theological question is: where does one´s hermeneutic lead? What are the consequences?
Though there is a formal acknowledgement of the Trinity, this "˜theology´ is not substantially Trinitarian. He does not recognize that God the Son incarnate was speaking in the Hebrew Scriptures. They miss this because of their overly strong view of the "substantial" (their word) novelty of the New Covenant. Any proposal of radical soteriological discontinuity between the Old and New Testaments must face squarely the overwhelming weight of the Patristic, Medieval, Reformation, and post-Reformation reading of Scripture to the contrary. Any radical discontinuity proposal will necessarily have grave difficulties becoming the Charybdis of Marcionite (two gods) heresy. It is not entirely clear how NCT can avoid this problem.
Further, superiority is not necessarily substantial discontinuity. That the NT teaches its own superiority over the Mosaic epoch is to be expected on the progressive covenantal reading of the Bible. It is not clear how the proponents of NCT can account for superiority.
Reformed Federal theology has always taught that there is a discontinuity between the Mosaic and New Covenants.
The claim that not a single reference to
Diatheke (Greek for "covenant" or "testament") demands reference to a single covenant is ridiculously mechanical on its face. Counting noses is not doing theology. The substance of the covenant of grace pervades the Scriptures of the
Diatheke so that it this analysis of the word is not compelling. Paul´s entire argument in Romans 3-4 hinges on the substantial unity of the covenant with Abraham. He is the father of all who believe. God made a covenant with him.
Implicit in this hermeneutic is a rejection of the analogy of faith and the analogy of Scripture. It doesn´t really appreciate the way the Hebrew Scriptures themselves understood and exposited the Decalogue. It doesn´t understand the reciprocal relations "general equity" of the law, general revelation/natural law (Rom 1) and the golden rule, and the relations of all of these expressions of God´s moral will to the divine nature.
The NCT seems to be unaware of its rather heavy nominalism, i.e., that the law is nothing more than an arbitrary divine imposition upon history to be changed again by divine will. Certainly in orthodox Protestant theology there is a place for a certain divine voluntarism, but it has always been balanced by certain realism as well.
This sub-Trinitarian hermeneutic is a problem that plagues evangelicalism generally. It leads to folk reading their bibles as if we had to do with the Father under the Hebrew Scriptures, the Son in the Gospels (and sometimes it is even implied that we're sort of alienated from the Father under Christ, so that we had more intimate fellowship with God under Moses!), and the Spirit in the Epistles.
We should not flatten out the history of redemption. The time of types and shadows is just that, and we don't need to make every epoch of revelation identical to every other, but we ought not to read the bible atomistically either.
I hope this helps.
rsc
